Season’s Greeting,s Programs!

 

OK, this is mostly just a toy acquisition post, because Entertainment  Earth and Fedex did finally get me toe Dimond Select Tron 3-Pack I ordered the weekend after Thanksgiving. But also I thought of this and then I had to do it. “Hey”, I asked myself, “Does the iPad compositing software I use have tacky-as-fuck Christmas templates?” The answer, of course, was yes.

EBAY OLDER GRAB: Marvel Legends Dazzler

 

Remember how I saw Luis and realized I never had Luis and went on eBay and found a Luis for cheap and got a Luis (and a Ghost)? Well, Disco Dazzler!

The Stupid Marvel Cartoon Project: Avengers Assemble Season 3: Ultron Revolution

NOTE: I just found this fully written and never posted from back in July. Since then, I started Season 4, got bogged down, got busy, forgot about it, and am now finishing it up. 

Season 3 opens on a suprisingly strong note. A two parter in which the Avengers, rusty as a team from months of doing their own thing in the absence of any global threats, ends up together fighting AIM’s new Adaptoids. At the end of the first part, AIM is defeated, but the Scientist Supreme, some of the Adaptoids, and some leftover Ultron tech bring Ultron back. In the second episode, they blow Ultron up. ‘ 

 

PRE-ORDER ARRIVED: MMPR Lightning Collection Snizzard

 

Snizzard! Destroy the power plant!

There’s a whole lot going on here, and most of it is snakes.

Yeah, I’m On That Marvel Snap Thing Too

I know everyone else is playing it and talking about it. But also I am too, and with Twitter gone and my one RL friend playing it largely unable to, I’m going to nerd out about it here.

MOAR PLASTIC: McFarlane Dark Knight Returns Wave

Entertainment Earth’s Black Friday sale put this wave on sale super cheap. I have fond memories of the Dark Knight Returns comics that, yes, take into consideration everything since and how I’ve changed and the world has changed in the intervening decades. But some of the designs are very iconic.

The figures all look like they should. They also all suffer from limited (slightly by McFarlane standards, more so by general standards” articulation. Three of the figures comes with things they can hold, but, as you can see, only one of them can fucking hold it. The hands are too thick and stiff, and the knife (Joker) and rope (Batman) are too soft and flexible. Proportions are really nice, though. Robin is easily my favorite of the set. Or, technically, second favorite, because this was a Build A Figure wave that I bought because I could get the BAF for $45 total and the figures are just a bonus.

HOOOOOOOOOOOORSE!

I have many usess for a generic six to seven inch scale horse, believe you me. It’s not a perfect horse, but it’s a perfectly reasonable horse. 

MOAR PLASTIC: Hasbro Pulse Sale

 I made some orders during the various holiday week type sales that went on, and the first batch, from the fine people at Hasbro Pulse, arrived over the weekend.

As with all of these, the general theme was “I liked them, but I didn’t like them enough to pay full price for them.”

Sonic Frontiers: Six Hours In

 

Oh, yeah. This is my Elden Ring.

MOAR PLASTIC: Luis and Ghost

At this point in my 6” figure collecting, I’ve gotten most of the Old Stuff that I can. A lot of it is simply unreasonably priced on the secondary market (looking at you, Juggernaut/Colossus 2-Pack). But every once in a while I find out about a figure I didn’t know existed, and look for it, and it’s very reasonable.

And so it is with Luis. I got this two pack almost exclusively because of Luis and the miniature lab. The Ghost is a bonus. And I got it for the price of a single Marvel Legends figure, so that worked out nicely.

≈

Now that I’m moving away from Twitter, I’ll probably lean harder into quick but slightly fancier posed pics for new acquisitions, although we’ll see how that goes once the Black Friday impulse buys start rolling through in the next week.

FIGPHOTO: Ironheart Vs. Namor

Nothing about this is really a spoiler, but I’ll put things after the jump if you’re being super-cautious about Wakanda Forever still.

ACQUISITION: Sonic Frontiers

 Gonna find out today if Sonic Fromtiers is my Elden Ring. I know somewhere out there is an Elden Ring for me and I know it’s not Elden Ring. 

There was a sale and I had a forgotten stash in the XBox wallet. This ensures that it will be on Game Pass by February. Looking at you, Guardians Of The Galaxy. 

We Bought A Wave

OK, full disclosure. This is technically not the third full wave of action figures I’ve bought since I got heavy into the six inchers a couple of years ago. It’s the third. But the first two don’t count.

Hasbro Selfie Series: X-Wing Pilot Me

So, yeah. I did this.

It’s Been A Busy Fall In A Busy Year

Whoops, looks like I haven’t posted (here) since the end of July. Lot of reasons for that. Some of which don’t go on the Internet.

The two big things that happened that will eventually be covered in this space? Well, for a few weeks before Labor Day, as those of you on Twitter saw, we went to the British Isles for a whirlwind tour. It was fun and tiring and I didn’t catch COVID somehow despite spending two weeks on a bus with like t50 couging elderly mostly unmasked people. Go Team N85.

Also, all year, we’ve been working on getting a solar + battery system installed in the house, which really kicked into gear right after we got back from the trip, took abou five weeks from start of installation to system activation, and then a couple weeks of rearranging the basement post-install. Which brings us, frankly, to about three weeks ago, during which I did some writing-and-not-posting and also Vampire Survivors came out and ate my brain.

So yeah, I’m gonna spend some time getting some posts ready and writing some more stuff now that the brain’s more up to it. I’m also embarking on two new figure photo projects soon, one minor and one… epic.

Figure Photography: OOPS! ALL TOMMIES!

 

Over the 30 years of Power Rangers history, the character of Tommy Oliver (Jason David Frank) has played a bunch of roles:

Your Kimchi Update

You bet your ass I planned this picture.

So, as of now, the house and cats have been fully integrated for a full week. Everyone’s sharing the house 100% of the time, and we’re comfortable trusting everyone overnight while we sleep and alone in the house while we’re out, which is a huge relief.

The Loadout: Mobile Games

Volume II of The Loadout covers mobile games. All these games are played pretty much exclusively on my iPad Pro, aka my primary computing device, aka my Large Print å

Figure Photography: “Contest of Champs”

Pretty self-explanatory. I haven’t seen the new movie yet because Life but I like to think Thor didn’t give up playing games with Korg after he got his shit together. 

Unhelpful Recipes: Cheater Birria Ramen

Unhelpful Recipes are recipes that for the most part will not help you .

Figure Photography: “Meme”

I mean, it was RIGHT THERE.

Lightning Collection Lord Zedd and Rita Repulsa (Wedding 2-Pack)

I may eventually revise this to fix the hands better but the meme’s only got a couple of days left so…

 

Figure Photography: “Practice, Practice, Practice”

Some of my figure photo plans will emerge as I go through and take stock of the full collection.

Some of my figure photo plans are waiting for certain Lightning Collection pre-orders to be fulfilled because they require a full team and I do not as yet have a full team

And sometimes you find a Tiny Arcade Dance Dance Revolution on sale at Target and you realize the scale is just about right and goddamn there it is.

The Stupid Marvel Cartoon Project: Avengers Assemble Season 2

For about 10 episodes of Season 2, I thought I was gonna describe this season of Avengers Assemble as comfortably settling into the very average mediocrity Season 1 eventually found. It was telling a barely serviceable knockoff of the Infinity Stones saga where all the stones are on Earth (well sort of), there is no Soul Stone, and each stone is acquired by our heroes  over the course of a single half hour episode.

The Loadout: Podcasts

So, in the interests of content generation and also implementing ideas that have been kicking around my head for years, I present the first installment in The Loadout. Basically, for any given category of nerd shit, what nerd shit am I fucking with? And what better way to start than the one that changes the least often - podcasts.

Dream Match: Alien Vs. Predator

 These have been sitting around waiting to be posted for a while, but the last batch of figure photos I did are more Dream Match pictures - “Alien Vs. Predator”.

The Stupid Marvel Cartoon Project: Avengers Assemble Season 1

One of the fun things about projects like this is disambiguating “bad”, I don’t like it”, and “Not intended for me”. The first season of Avengers Assemble, after much consideration, is mostly nad but works its way to sorta competent by the end. 

Meet Kimchi

So this is why I haven’t posted anything for a few weeks even though I’ve gotten new toys, finished Avengers Assemble Season 1 and done a writeup, and made a new batch of Dream Match toy pics. And gotten new toys.

Figure Photography: May Be Trouble

 

Not gonna lie. I had so much fun making this it validated the entire idea to start doing this. 

Figure Photography: “Dream Match 2”

Dream Match 2 also features Orange Cassidy, in one of his more active modes. The hands-in-pockets shotgun dropkick! 

Figure Photography: “Dream Match 1”

This is pretty basic and self-explanatory. Two figures, wrestling ring background, make it look like they’re fighting. There’s gonna be a bunch of these because, well, I think it’s fun.

The Stupid Marvel Cartoon Project: Iron Man & Hulk: Heroes United

 Can you call it a palate cleanser when it’s mostly garbage?

Heroes United: Iron Man and Hulk is the first of a series of PS4-launch-era-style CGI cutscenes that try to leverage the popularity of the MCU and the success of the DC Animated direct to video movies as cheaply as possible, and it shows.

The Famous Covers Collection Is Complete

’ve bought a lot of toys over a lot of years, but one of the absolute peak times was the late 90’s and early 2000’s. And a big thing in that time was the Toy Biz “Famous Covers” series.

The Stupid Marvel Cartoon Project: Ultimate Spider-Man

If I were to say one thing about “Ultimate Spider-Man”, I’d have to say this. It goes down reeeeeal easy.

Doctor Strange

 

Wing Envy

 

Another New Dumb Hobby

So, I guess my hobby needed a hobby?

I have a lot of action figures. And in the latter half of 2021, I started getting back into 6-ish” scale in a big way, thanks mostly to Hasbro, a bit of DC Multiverse, and Jazwares’ All Elite Wrestling toys.

Game Pass: The New Batch

Been a while since I talked Game Pass but a shit-ton of new games came out recently and I’ve been trying them out. Haven’t found anything to tear me away or even really distract me from my current obsession (another post) but I gave everything I downloaded a try except Elite Dangerous which wanted me to create an account with the developer company and I ain’t gonna do controller password entry to fuck with a free game.

The Stupid Marvel Cartoon Project: Super Hero Squad / Avengers: EMH

The One That Broke Me

It’s been a weird five months. I went on vacation in September for like three weeks and… then it was January? The point is, for various reasons, this project bogged down, and one of the big reasons was Super Hero Squad